Ed Driscoll on 'Conflating Punditry And Reporting'

Several of the recent posts here have focused on the surprisingly brief life and quiet death of objectivity in the legacy mass media. Or as Victor Davis Hanson
wrote in the last days of the 2008 presidential election, "Sometime in
2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place."

The replacement is a curiously schizophrenic beast; blending punditry and journalism; turning every newspaper into the Washington Times without the conservative op-eds, every network news department into Fox News without the pro-American populism.

The rise of Fox News as the No. 1 cable news outlet has resulted in ideological counterprograming.
[emphasis in original--Ed] The success of a conservative news network
has had an effect that might be best understood by reference to
Newton's third law of motion. At first, there was the "equal effect" --
chastened by Fox's success, most networks sought to rein in their
traditional liberal bias. But then, after the 2004 election, the
"opposite effect" kicked in. Network executives figured, "Hey, Fox
already has a monopoly on conservative viewers. Let's let our freak
flags fly and give liberals what they really want." I really noticed
this phenomenon during the 2006 campaign, when the media (a) pretended
that the contributions Jack Abramoff's clients made to Democrats were
meaningless, and (b) presented Mark Foley as the GOP poster boy. The
existence of Fox News provides a ready-made excuse for liberals in the
media to think of their bias as "balancing" Fox.